Here is a review of this new book by Robert Reilly. (HT: Monterey Tom) Excerpt:
Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture is simply the most famous of the many examples of Christian outreach in the midst of an era in which conflict and misunderstanding seem insoluble by being inevitable. As Mr. Reilly points out, the pope’s particular approach to credo ut intelligam was an example of charity, which makes the violent reaction of many Muslims to his remarks “all the more ironic.”
I would say instead that the violent reaction shows just what crazy fanatics Islamists are.
I explain this in detail in Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity. My piece ends with a warning:
The trouble with the Islamic world is that nothing occurred in it comparable to our Enlightenment. In the West, Christianity was chastened and its tendency towards fanaticism held in check by the philosophers. Athens disciplined Jerusalem. (And of course this began long before the Enlightenment.) Nothing similar happened in the Islamic world. They have no Athens. (Yes, I know all about al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, et al. -- that doesn't alter the main point.) Their world is rife with unreasoning fanatics bent on destroying 'infidels' -- whether they be Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or other Muslims. We had better wake up to this threat, or one day soon we will wake up to a nuclear 'event' in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles which kills not 3,000 but 300,000. People who think this is 'inconceivable' or 'unimaginable' have lousy imaginations. Militant Muslims and their leftist enablers need to be opposed now, and vigorously, before it too late.
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